We take it for granted when we visit a normal store that we will be able to touch, feel, try on and compare products.

You can see the colour of one jacket matched against another jacket. You can see the shadow of blue on a garment vs the shadow of black. You can touch the material it is made of. You can try it on for size. Do I need a larger or smaller size than I’m used to?

But when it comes to products online we don’t have these senses available to us. We must rely on the excellence of the photographs taken and the outlines about the products written by the merchant’s salesforce.

And yet so many normal firms fail to leverage their physical location as a business catalyst for their internet sales. They neglect their product photography or use second rate or reduced cost photography to capture, explain and sell their products online.

Some companies, in an effort to shave costs or cut corners, take pictures themselves on their own digicam or maybe use their own mobile phones.

Some outlets get in contact with their providers and take photographs from their catalogue. The difficulty with this technique is that the manufacture often will offer a lifestyle photograph of the product or will only supply the image from one angle.

If you’ve gone and taken all the time, investment and effort to optimise your product pages so that future customers can find what they are attempting to find then the very last thing you would like to do is lose that buyers who is let down by a poorly presented product.

Now you need to use iPhone to take pictures of your own products. The image quality is ok. However you want the right clobber. You need a light box, you want a background image, you want something to hang your product on or from and of course you want a person with the right experience and eye for detail that knows the simplest way to take photographs that sell.

Take a look at any major ecommerce web site. Every product will have at least 3 photographs of a product taken different angles. Additionally, there will be high resolution zoom-in options so you can see the best details on a product; just like you were in store touching the product.

Let your photographs do your selling and actually invest in the right hardware and the correct photographer.

Molly Jamieson writes for Adobe Business Catalyst partner Platonik. They have examples of net stores built using Adobe Business Catalyst.

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